She had her father’s long arms, his sneaky agility under the basket and his tenacious spirit. But whereas Kevin McHale preferred to bewilder defenders with a quick hook from either hand, Alexandra was far more content to pass the ball. After a game she’d check the stat sheet for her assist total, then look at her foul count. Rarely did either ever make her frown.

“She’s always been more of a team player. Her thing is defense and finding open teammates,” McHale proudly said of his daughter during the Minnesota Class AAA state tournament in 2008, when she earned honorable mention all-state honors for the Totino-Grace High School Eagles during their championship season.

She played forward, her dad’s position, wore the No. 32 that graced his back throughout his glorious Hall of Fame career with the Boston Celtics and could mimic his biting wit, his hard fouls, his footwork and those crazy fakes and fadeaway spins. Grace flowed easily through her 5 feet, 11 inches. Everyone called her Sasha, but to McHale she was daddy’s little girl.

And like him, she had a deep affection for Minnesota, its ubiquitous lakes and rolling hills and communal warmth. Her father was born and raised in the charming Northeast town of Hibbing that also produced national treasures Bob Dylan and Roger Maris. Even after the Houston Rockets lured McHale away to be their head coach following a long and colorful coaching and executive career with the Timberwolves, Sasha remained in her beloved state.

She died there on Saturday, two weeks after McHale took a leave of absence from the Rockets for personal reasons. We now know it was to be with his daughter at her home in the suburbs outside of St. Paul. Sasha was 23, the fourth of Kevin and Lynn’s five children.

Ask anyone about Sasha and they all speak of her high-pitched laugh, her joyous nature, and while some knew she was battling lupus, a chronic auto-immune disease, very few outside the family’s close circle realized how ill she had become, or how valiantly she battled its attack on her body.

Lupus is an insidious illness, its symptoms often mirroring those that haunt other diseases. It is far more common in women than men; it is believed to be caused by a combination of genetics, environment, and hormones; and there is treatment but no cure. It is unpredictable and infuriating – the immune system basically tries to destroy healthy tissue, causing chronic inflammation and immense fatigue.

Those with lupus are extremely sensitive to sunlight, and as the disease takes root, the worst thing for someone suffering from it is exposure to the sun. But who wouldn’t want to spend warm days on the shores of Lake Minnetonka? The McHales are also one of those extremely athletic families, their days and nights dominated by sports. Sasha, according to her friends, despised the way lupus had begun to transcend the essence of her core.

They say she did not become seriously ill until 2011, while studying abroad in Australia, where sun worshipping is a way of life. She returned to Minnesota, and eventually began missing classes at the University of Minnesota Duluth, where she was studying liberal arts. Exhaustion started to wipe out the young woman who only a short time ago had been a varsity basketball player for three years, as exuberant on the bench as she was in the post.

"She was an outstanding basketball player and the life of the locker room," Shannon Hartinger, Sasha’s coach at Totino-Grace, told the Star Tribune. "She was a joy to be around. You could tell she loved to play basketball.

"She was like her dad, everything rolled off her back,” Hartinger added. “They were a very close family."

In the last year, Sasha fought lupus with every ounce of her being, cutting sugar from her diet, then gluten, and studying the background of any supplement known to reduce inflammation. Lupus assaulted her skin and joints, her lungs and her nervous system, but always she hit back even though the treatment (high-dose corticosteroids, potent cytotoxic drugs) can be more brutal than the symptoms.

Even when Sasha was hospitalized this month in Minneapolis, Kelvin Sampson, Houston’s head coach in McHale's absence, told reporters the situation was fluctuating. “It’s not out of the woods yet. There’s still a lot of concern, but it is improving," Sampson said. Two of Sasha’s close friends tell me they, too, believed as recently as Thanksgiving night that she would recover from this latest setback.

So much about lupus remains a mystery. Up to 90 percent of people with the disease can live a normal life span provided they have close follow-up and treatment, according to the Lupus Foundation of America. But lupus-related organ failures and deaths are on a sharp rise, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

McHale remains on indefinite leave from the Rockets. As of Monday afternoon the funeral arrangements were still pending, but family and friends were said to be planning a celebration of Sasha’s 23 years, to pay tribute to all she adored.

Sure to be included: the breathtaking allure of Minnesota’s lakes and its shorelines, and especially the magnetism of its gyms, where she wore her daddy’s No. 32 and played forward with his aggressive intensity, his natural grace.